LIFE THE TRAVELER 



great, honest, patient, penetrating investigator, and 

 his inquiries put biological science in the front ranks 

 of the great sciences, alongside of astronomy and 

 geology, making with them the great trinity of 

 sciences. 



Darwin made no attempt to grapple with the 

 question of the nature and origin of life itself, but 

 only with the evolution of the many forms of life. 

 He was not a laboratory naturalist, but a student 

 of the drama of animate nature as it is enacted 

 on the earth's surface. He held to the special and 

 miraculous creation theory of his fathers, but 

 limited it to one or more forms. Out of this begin- 

 ning he thought, through the fortuitous operation 

 of natural selection, all the myriad forms of life 

 have been evolved. This is Darwinism in its sim- 

 plest terms — a miraculous beginning of life, but 

 a natural unfolding. Is it not like asking us to 

 credit the immaculate conception, followed by the 

 birth of a normal baby, and its normal development 

 into child and man? 



Darwin formed his ideas of natural selection 

 upon artificial selection, but the two are funda- 

 mentally unlike. There is an active agent involved 

 in the one case, which has specific and limited ends 

 to attain, and hence which thwarts the tendencies 

 of nature. But what is the active agent correspond- 

 ing to man, in the other? Natural selection is the 

 name for a process set going and kept going by the 



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